They are kind of like a C "cast", but only superficially, as they really don't allow you to convert between types. I would tend to call them "dereferences", which is more like C's pointer '*', only in this case you are specifying the type of thing that you are dereferencing explicitly. I would imagine that people who have not been exposed to C are more likely to be unfamiliar with pointers.

Don't forget that there is also ${ } for scalar references, though this is less frequently used.

The "spoken" version of Perl would be something like:

my $x = \$z;
# "$x is a reference to scalar $z"

my $y = $$x;
# "$y is a copy of the scalar referenced by $x"

my $w = $row{b};
# "$w is assigned the value of %row's 'b' entry"

my @v = @{$row{b}};
# "@v is a copy of the array referenced by %row's b entry"
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Note that when you assign something, you might have to further dereference it to make any use out of it. That is, $y might actually be another reference.